Aura and Cinemachine take Dance Collider teaser trailers to the next level!

Teasers trailers for Dance Collider have landed and we're stoked to get the word out. It's been crunch-time for team emergeWorlds over the past two weeks to put together some tasty previews of our VR dance/rhythm game. During that time a couple of amazing Unity tools have helped us take things to the next level. Let's look at some!

The first is a nifty little lighting and fog plugin called Aura. Our dance battles take place in vast open arenas with light shows syncing up to music. Our lobby is a neon-drenched underground nightclub 300 years from now. We had already gone through a few lighting and fog options but the look just wasn't up to scratch. I wanted the spaces to have a really rich atmospheric touch. Vivid hues of light playing across fog. Thankfully, Aura was up to the task. It suddenly felt like we'd been given a paintbrush to paint with, where before we'd been using a blunt pencil ;) Watching through our teasers you'll get a sense of the rich palettes we've been developing with this tool. Admittedly, we had to work through some technical obstacles associated with point light shadows. The results speak for themselves though and it's destined to become a permanent lighting/fog solution for all future projects.

The second tool that we've been loving is Cinemachine. I had already seen the great work by Neill Blomkamp but we had yet to try it out for ourselves. In addition to gameplay footage we were keen to get some cinematic shots of our nightclub to establish setting and introduce characters. The tool slots right into the Unity pipeline effortlessly and suddenly your game development platform is turned into a movie studio. Cameras can be setup up around the scene either static or dolly. All of these then feed into one main camera and timeline where we have the ability to lay out our shots. The jump from Unity to Premiere is then made by building a special 'cinematic' version of the game from which we captured 1920x1080 footage.

The other day I watched a clip of Steven Spielberg directing Ready Player One in VR and at the time thinking 'this is the future of directing'. Now, having used Cinemachine I'm even more convinced this is will be the case. Whether it be VR, games, film or any other narrative driven piece this workflow will become a potent tool in the hands of storytellers, in teams large or small!